Oven of Unbreaking Edibles

Who would want to make food you can’t eat? What purpose does this insane oven exist for?

Full Item Description A large brick oven sits in the middle of some ruins, somewhere in the plains of your campaign world. Although you don’t know it yet, it will serve its purpose. Is it magical? Oh yes, it is magical. Where did this magic come from and what is it for? Read on, dear reader, read on.

This Oven, blackened by fire and time, sits in the open air giving off pleasant aromas of biscuits and other baked goods. They smell wonderful and attract the savage people from all over the plains and nearby forest. Who has been cooking with this ancient oven? What did they make, and can I have some?

History & Magical Properties These ruins have sat for ages in the Far-Away Plains of the North. In the middle of the ruins, tucked under an alcove of stone, sits a blackened stone oven. Recently someone has used the oven to bake something and the smell is driving the wild ones… well, wild. And their hunger cannot be satiated until they taste of the food from this magical oven… Or so they seem to presume.

In truth, this oven does function. However, the food it makes is quite unedible despite its delicious smell. The food is actually rock hard and almost unbreakable, in fact anything cooked or heated in the oven for at least one hour has these properties. The longer something stays in the oven, the more unbreakable it is. And the longer it takes to cool down. This does not mean the heat and flame will not take its toll on the item, so you couldn’t put something like a wooden bow in there, it would burst into flames.

Additional Ideas - The Oven Ruins are a Holy Site of your possibly forgotten God of the Forge.

- A Sword is heated with a batch of Blueberry Muffins. It is the most sold blade around and smells delightful (Possibly wielded by some sort of masked crusader who become known by this trademark scent of fresh BlueBerry Muffins).

- A King has smelled the Oven’s delights and wants the food for himself, he will be greatly disappointed…

- Savages are having a war over the Oven, many lives have been lost. Will anything short of annihilation end the bloodshed?

- If you need a weakness for this Oven’s unbrekable items try this: Saliva softens up the materials and makes them "melt in the mouth." Only covering the item about halfway in saliva will melt it, you can’t simply destroy someone’s shield by spitting on it. But watch out for those large creatures that like to put people in their mouths.

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This submission was inspired by a note i had jotted down a while ago, I found it and it simply said "Unbreaking Bran Bites." What I could have been thinking of doing with "Unbreaking Bran Bites" is a mystery to me. But I think this turned out well. Feel free to post up some more ideas related to the Oven.

Horribly, horribly abusable by PCs, and it would take a fair bit of work to integrate it into a campaign. But the idea of the detrius from the oven floating around strikes the imagination. It could be great fun to taunt a party with.

Some things I might have to change, though:
1: All cooked items take on the density of baked goods. This vastly reduces the value of a wall (or even a shield) made out of bread. Makes a baguette into a poor club, too. Alternately, the oven may only harden things that are otherwise edible.

2: If it's invulnerable, it can't be sharpened after it comes out. Alternately, if a baked good is baked long enough, it will shatter like glass. Don't over do it!

It isn't necessarily silly, though. If you have seen the strength of iron but do not have access to anything but soft materials, this seems logical enough - baking certain materials to harden them has been done for a long time. This just extends the notion out to include anything shoved in the oven.

The real question is if it just makes the material harder to sunder, or if it actually stiffens it as well; I could see warriors in grass armor that's been baked in the oven, if it stiffens it, turning aside blades that should have laid them open; over, if it doesn't stiffen it, a dancer-type having scarves that've been baked in the oven - loose and flowing, but gripped between two hands capable of blocking even the mightiest of blows without tearing.

This is funny, and I like it, but I am confused by the statment "The longer something stays in the oven, the more unbreakable it is." If something is 'unbreakable', it won't break. How much MORE not able to be broken can it be?

It could be very easily abused by PC's but there are easy and fun ways to restrict it's use. For example, the oven doesn't have to be big enough to cook a turkey, make it have an opening like a pizza oven. Have it need a certain type of wood for fuel, or something exotic, like dried treant dung.

Another great way to limit it's effectiveness is to make everything treated in the oven 'spoil' like food does. You might have an unbreakable sword now, but in a couple weeks it will be wilted and browned.

If it is a regular size oven, and there's a halfling with a ring of fire protection ... Things will not end well...

There was a ball advertised as unbreakable; it was, for the critters it was meant to be given to (dogs, cats, etc), and then someone gave one to a lion. The ball shattered.

So something might be "unbreakable" to a hobbit, but not a human, or unbreakable to an ogre but not a giant.

I'd have to say I like the idea of the items 'going bad' like food, particularly since it brings to mind the Colonization game (where things like firearms, ore, and the like could spoil and go bad). Rust that you just can't get rid of, rapid increase of brittleness, and so on.

While the original post doesn't contain them, it is easy to get the hard rules from the discussion, so I won't detract points from that. Also, the oven inspires ideas, and that is good in my book. What I would really welcome is some history - it is promised at the beginning, but barely touched on later. Was it cursed? Blessed by god of ____? Enchanting gone awry? There must be something strange in it's origin... even if it's the legend of some locals, that have it completely wrong.

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In the Middle Ages, and even up to the early twentieth century, most of Europe's executioners were related: the Sansons and Deiblers in France, the Pierrepoints in England, etc. The reason for this was that, it generally not being socially acceptable to, well, kill people, executioners and their children could, generally, only marry other executioners or their children.
The parallels with massively inbred, Hapsburg-style dynasties are obvious- imagine a rather clever but politically inept satirist noting this, and being sentenced by the latter to a meeting with the former; even worse, imagine a dynasty of deranged and deformed executioners- think Texas Chaisaw Massacre with government funding.